Phone: +39 0172 458593
Email: g.volpato@unisg.it
Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche
Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, 9
fraz. Pollenzo – 12042 Bra (Cn)
BIOGRAPHY
Gabriele Volpato is research fellow for the project ‘Pastoral systems and dynamics in an era of globalization’ and teaches the courses ‘Food biodiversity’ and ‘Human ecology and gastronomic heritage’ at Unisg. He has an MSc in Ecological and Biological Sciences from the University of Padua and a PhD in Social Sciences and Anthropology from the University of Wageningen (NL). His research background and interests are interdisciplinary and include human ecology and use and management of natural resources, ethnobiology, food systems and their sustainability, human-animal interactions, and livestock husbandry and pastoral systems. For his PhD, he conducted a research among the Sahrawi refugees and nomads of Western Sahara, investigating their subsistence practices and ethnobiological knowledge, especially in relation to the use of desert resources and to dromedary camel husbandry. Within a Post-doc at the University of Athens (Georgia, US), Volpato has conducted fieldwork among the Maa-speaking pastoralists of Laikipia (Kenya) investigating resilience and change in local households and communities using camel husbandry and beekeeping as case studies. Volpato has also investigated, as research fellow with Wageningen University, the role of traditional ethnobotanical knowledge and practices for the resilience of Cuban peasants in the context of a relocalization of the national food system during the 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, within the project ‘Food Systems for Sustainable Development in Africa’ at Unisg, Volpato conducted anthropological research in the Kenyan Rift Valley: in the context of an expanding commodity frontier there, the research focused on the one hand on the strategies of food procurement by migrant workers at the export-oriented flower farms of Naivasha, and on the other hand on the impacts of the frontier’s expansion on local Maasai pastoralism, mobility, and livelihoods, and on ensuing adaptations.
MAIN INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AREA in UNISG
SPECIFIC RESEARCH TOPICS
- Anthropology
- Human Ecology
- Human-animal Interactions
- Ethnobiology
- Food Systems
RESEARCH PROJECTS UNISG
- SASS – Sustainable Agri-Food System Strategies
- SHEEP-UP – Ovine Bio-diversity in Veneto: an economic opportunity for Farmers and their Territory